


killing it with close inspection

by bottomlinsons



Series: every day i'm drabblin' [5]
Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alien Abduction, Aliens, Alternate Universe - Space, Bathtub, I think this counts as alien abduction?, M/M, Prompt Fic, Tumblr Prompt, Virginity, this space au exists in my mind as a mashup of star trek and battlestar au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-04
Updated: 2019-02-04
Packaged: 2019-10-22 05:27:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17656781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bottomlinsons/pseuds/bottomlinsons
Summary: tumblr trope mashup: space au, bathtub fic & unexpected virginity





	killing it with close inspection

**Author's Note:**

> title is a lyric from lcd soundsystem's 'dance yrself clean' 
> 
> this is weird. i'm not sorry.

Louis misses the days when doors used to slam. A proper slam, you know, the kind that thumps against the walls and stills the air. He’s never heard it himself, of course – those sorts of doors were done away with a few hundred years ago – but he’s seen it in the films. It just seems so much cooler, you know?  

Here, now, the door that closes behind them really only makes a little ‘ _whoosh_ ’ noise as it slides shut.  

It’s much less dramatic. It’s also much less noisy, which means that Louis can hear it when Harry whispers an equally little ‘ _fuck’_ under his breath.

Then it’s silent for a little bit.

Louis can’t stand that.

“So…”

Harry holds up a hand, so abruptly that Louis startles a little. “Don’t.”

Louis swallows and thinks it over for a second. Then he takes a deep breath. “Don’t what—?”

“Don’t do anything!” Harry’s glare is something very, very fierce. “Don’t – don’t talk, don’t make this weird.”

“It’s not weird!” That earns Louis a withering stare. He presses on. “What? It’s actually not!”

“It’s weird and you know it, Louis.”

Louis doesn’t like it much when Harry calls him by his full name, but he knows now’s really not the time to talk about it. Instead of pouting, he takes a deep breath.

“It’s not.” He says it slower this time, a little less shrill. If Harry understands that Louis’ being serious here, maybe he’ll stop panicking quite so much. “I promise, Haz. It’s no big deal.”

Harry doesn’t calm down. In fact, he gets far more worked up.

“It _is_ a big deal, Lou, don’t lie!” and hey, he’s shouting, but at least they’re back to ‘Lou’. “It’s a big deal, and it’s embarrassing, and pretending it’s not is really condescending and like patronising, so just stop! Alright!”

Thing is, Louis doesn’t like getting yelled at very much. It makes his cheeks feel hot and his shoulders feel too small for his body and it’s especially bad when the yelling is coming from his very sweet and very clever First Officer.

“It’s not!” Louis shouts, automatic defences kicking in. “Everyone’s a virgin!”

There’s a pause.

Harry stares at him.

“You know.” Louis clears his throat. “At some point.”

Harry scoffs and turns his back. There’s not much room in the cell they’ve been chucked in, so there’s not really anywhere for him to walk, but he tries his best to put some distance between them. He walks to the far wall and sinks down, letting his head fall back against it as he closes his eyes.

“I can’t believe this is happening.”  

Louis approaches carefully. “Hey, it’s okay, you know. It’s gonna be fine.”

“How is it going to be fine!?”

And like, Louis doesn’t know _one-hundred-percent_ , but that doesn’t matter. He just needs to have faith in the half of them that didn’t get captured by a weird inter-galactic sex cult. “The crew will get us. They always do.”

Yeah? Before or after I get sacrificed at some altar to summon a pigeon-God that almost certainly doesn’t exist?”

Harry’s a bit snappy this afternoon. Louis gets it, he does.

“Well,” Louis says. “Before. Obviously.”

Harry sighs for a long time. “Why’d they even put you in here with me?”

Louis goes a bit pink. Their captors don’t exactly speak English, which has made translation a little bit tricky. Their revelation that Harry – _Louis’_ Harry, most popular bloke on the ship Harry, subject of about a million rumours which Louis only now knows are one-hundred-percent untrue Harry – was a virgin had taken some work to convey. There was a lot of hand gestures, ones that only got more and more emphatic as the language barrier became apparent.

They’d figured it out in the end, though. Some gestures are just universal, apparently.

This time he doesn’t have a monk dressed in purple to shout at him. What he does have, however, is a clear enough head to notice the huge white bath on the other side of the room.

“Um. I think I’m supposed to wash you?”

Harry’s head jerks quite violently. “What?!”

Louis nods at the bath. “Yeah, and they were doing this.” He recreates the motion their captors had shown him, rubbing little circles on his own chest. “And they gave me this.”

He holds up the little sponge they’d shoved in his hands before locking them in.

Harry scowls. His cheeks are pink too, though. “And you didn’t think to mention that?”

“I’m mentioning it now!”

Harry swears a bit in the language from his homeland. Louis understands about as much of it as he’d understood from the crazy monks, but it doesn’t sound delicate. He can guess at Harry’s likely sentiment.

“Why do I even need a wash? Isn’t that the whole point of this? I’m untainted, or like, whatever?”

“Hey. I’ve heard your jokes, you’re as tainted as the rest of us.”

Harry glares again. “Thanks ever so.”

“You are though.” Louis drops himself down at Harry’s side. “Doesn’t matter where your dick’s been.”

“Yeah, well.” Harry sounds defeated, which Louis doesn’t like at all. “Apparently that’s not how they see it.”

Louis thinks about it for a little while. “Right,” he says, slow cause he’s now thinking quite hard. “So it’s a translation thing.”

“What?”

Leaning against the wall like this, Harry has to peer over his shoulder to look Louis in the eye.

“They think you’re this like, clean and pure thing, right? So we just have to get them to change their mind.”

Or at least delay them long enough for the crew to get their butt’s into gear.

“And how are we going to do that?”  

Louis swallows.

“Well. What if… what if I don’t get you clean?”

Harry rolls his eyes. He’s started to thump his head against the wall in a rhythm. “I don’t think postponing a bath is going to help that much.”

Louis’s chest feels quite empty, all of a sudden, like all the air in the room’s just gone and abandoned him completely. He clears his throat.

“No, like. What if I, like, get you dirty instead?”

Harry’s head is still thumping. He’s closed his eyes again.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

_Thump – thump – thump._

“They’re not interested in me, right?” _Thump – thump – thump._ Maybe that’s just the thudding of Louis’ heart, now lodged thoroughly in his throat. “There must be a reason. So we’ve just got to, like, make the same thing apply to you.”

Harry snorts. “What, like rubbing your dirtiness off on me?”

“Uh. Sure.” Louis’s face is burning. “Rubbing would be involved.”

The thumping stops.

Harry eyes go very wide, very quickly.

“Oh. _Oh._ ”

**Author's Note:**

> tbc??????????????????
> 
> if ya feel at all like supporting a gal with writers block and an intense praise kink u can reblog this [here](http://bottomlinsons.tumblr.com/post/182548511472)
> 
> comments are cocaine xx


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